A cartoonist rewrites Japanese history

by Philippe Pons

In the last 10 issues of his cartoon-strip series “Manifesto of the new pride”, published in the magazine Saplo, Yoshinori Kobayashi always uses the same basic approach: the main character, a kind of double of himself (who always dresses in the same way as his creator - in black, with round glasses and his hair swept back), orchestrates the story like a presenter in a TV chat-show. Fired up by what he sees as the lies and injustices all around him, he throws up facts, shares anecdotes, gets emotional, lets the anger hang out. The way he harangues his readers, hurls opinions in their faces and showers them with sarcasm makes his writing lively and provocative. He introduces his rants with a catch-phrase: “Let me show you how proud I am of being proud”. In Koyabashi’s view, being proud of your pride is to show strength of character and to turn your back on the malaise of pity and compassion that has affected Japan since the end of the second world war.

In On War, published in1998 by Gentosha and printed in a best-seller edition of over 600,000, the author’s protagonist stands on his balcony overlooking the city. This is peace, he comments, but “nobody knows the true nature of peace”. Is peace the opposite of war? No. Peace is “order”. And then he starts explaining to today’s youth what war really was. Like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno he becomes our guide through the inner depths of the “real war which took the Japanese people through the miraculous victories of the early period and the tragic battles of the period of defeat.” "Remove your electrodes - this was a just war !" he thunders at the reader - a reference to the helmets of the Aum sect, which were supposed to keep adepts in permanent spiritual contact with their gurus.

On War brings together recurrent themes present in Kobayashi’s previous cartoon strips. He denounces the individualism that has led his peers to lose their civic sense. And he rails at the “information war” conducted by the left and the media to silence the truth about the past. He claims that “gullible citizens are being manipulated by the Marxists”.

One of Kobayashi’s favourite themes is the “just” nature of what had originally begun as “a war against the white racists” who had colonised Asia. In his view the Japanese army taught them a well-deserved lesson. He pushes to extremes the provocative thesis - Japanese expansionism as a war for the liberation of the peoples of Asia - amply developed by right-wing intellectuals such as Fusao Hayashi (1903-75) in the period after the second world war.

Kobayashi also ventures onto dangerous ground when he denies one of the worst atrocities committed by the Japanese army: the massacre of Nanking. “If you really want to look at falsifications of history during the Tokyo International Tribunal, look how they treated the Nanking incident. … They [the victors] needed a crime that would balance the 300,000 Japanese dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

On the question of the “comfort women” (the 200,000 Asian women forced into prostitution to satisfy the needs of Japanese soldiers during the war), Kobayashi also joins the negationists. He explicitly denied Japanese responsibility in an earlier instalment of Manifesto for a New Pride (vol 3), where he denounced the work of the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi who had published documents from army archives revealing the responsibility of the Japanese High Command for procuring these women. He claims that Yoshimi quoted selectively from military regulations that were actually designed to deter and punish rape by soldiers. He is equally revisionist in his latest volume Taiwan Ron (On Taiwan), in which he quotes a Chinese source affirming that these women were already prostitutes and that “becoming comfort women was a step up for them, because they preferred military brothels to civilian brothels”. At this point outrage turns to contempt.